Orphans

Edward Albee’s influence.

Young love, first love: Elizabeth Stanley and James Snyder in the musical “Cry-Baby.”Credit ROBERT RISKO

“There is no such thing as naturalism in the theatre, merely degrees of stylization,” Edward Albee once observed. If nothing else, the musical version of John Waters’s 1990 film “Cry-Baby” (directed by Mark Brokaw, at the Marquis) is a lesson in careful, moderate style. Set in Baltimore in the nineteen-fifties, “Cry-Baby” is about two young lovers: Allison (Elizabeth Stanley), a pampered good girl, and Wade (James Snyder), a guitar-wielding, leather-jacket-wearing member of a gang of ruffians known as the Drapes. Wade was orphaned when both of his parents were executed for a crime that they didn’t commit; after they died, he was nicknamed Cry-Baby. (“I cried when my parents died,” he says. “But never since, and never again.”) From the moment Wade and Allison meet—at a polio-inoculation drive in the park, where they’re both getting their shots—little is left to the viewer’s imagination. If a plot point isn’t spelled out in the script, it’s covered in the songs, which are bright and bouncy and untroubling. Cry-Baby may not reform his raffish ways, but he will get the girl in the end.

As the play rolls along, there’s much lampooning of Allison and Cry-Baby’s horniness, and an entire number about French-kissing: “The night, just like us, is still young. / And it’s long, and it’s slow, and I need to know: / Girl, can I kiss you with tongue?” There’s also a dash of John Waters perversity. (In the opening polio-drive scene, a young boy in an iron lung is wheeled out, and he sings, “I sure wish I could have gotten that shot!”) The polio drive was organized by Allison’s grandmother, Mrs. Vernon-Williams, a civic-minded woman who, it turns out, was partly responsible for the wrongful conviction of Cry-Baby’s parents. (Believing that she was protecting her friends, she provided the real perpetrators with a false alibi.) In a wide picture hat, with belt and shoes to match, Mrs. Vernon-Williams is dippy and square and not much in the way of a villain. The comedic actress Harriet Harris’s performance of the role is oddly reminiscent of the two best white drag performers of the past decade: John Epperson as Lypsinka, and Justin Bond, of Kiki and Herb. Harris’s double takes and highly exaggerated reactions to almost everything, including her own thoughts, make “Cry-Baby” a richer show all around. And funnier than its creators could have imagined.

Edward Albee dedicated his short, elegiac play “The Sandbox” (1959) to the memory of his grandmother, and one suspects that the playwright, who was thirty-one at the time, didn’t make the dedication lightly. Albee was famously estranged from his wealthy adoptive parents at a young age, and much of his early work reads like a Waspish, biting, and youthful condemnation of his family’s various vanities, including the fiction that they were at all equipped to take care of him. (He reportedly remarked, “They weren’t very good at being parents, and I wasn’t very good at being a son.”) Still, it’s Grandma—played well, if a trifle too adorably, by Lois Markle—who is drawn with something like love in “The Sandbox” and in Albee’s 1960 play “The American Dream,” both of which are now being revived at the Cherry Lane under the playwright’s beautifully self-aware direction.

Each play features a set of monstrous parents called Mommy and Daddy, and an often ill-treated character called Grandma. As much as the young Albee may have loved his grandmother, it’s the hateful mother figure who most fully engages his imagination. In “The American Dream,” Mommy (the well-cast Judith Ivey) tries to control a world that baffles her because it does not turn according to her considerable calculations. Ivey’s wide face expresses only disapproval or strident joy; she sparkles at the idea of someone else’s misfortune. Sitting in her garishly lit parlor—the wallpaper is patterned in red, white, and blue—in a licorice-red suit, Mommy commandeers her domestic sphere. She addresses Daddy (George Bartenieff) in a Tweety Bird voice, although if Mommy is like any kind of bird at all it’s a carrion crow. Over the years, she has pecked away at Daddy’s jugular, and the more private parts of his anatomy, rendering him childlike and ineffectual. (In a note to the published text of “The Sandbox,” Albee writes, “When, in the course of the play, Mommy and Daddy call each other by these names, there should be no suggestion of regionalism. These names are empty of affection and point up the pre-senility and vacuity of their characters.”)

Throughout the play, there is much talk about the “van man,” who may or may not be coming to take Grandma away to an old-age home. The presence of Grandma, the custodian of several family secrets, promises to expose Mommy and Daddy for the fakes that they are. Early in this absurdist drama—think of Arthur Adamov making notes while wandering in an American suburb—a woman named Mrs. Barker comes to call. She may or may not have worked at the Bye-Bye Adoption Service, where, years earlier, Mommy and Daddy picked up what Grandma calls their “bumble of joy.” But Mommy and Daddy were unsatisfied with the child they chose. As Grandma tells Mrs. Barker:

It turned out the bumble didn’t look like either one of its parents. That was enough of a blow, but things got worse. One night, it cried its heart out, if you can imagine such a thing. . . . But that was only the beginning. Then it turned out it only had eyes for its Daddy.

MRS. BARKER: For its Daddy! Why, any self-respecting woman would have gouged those eyes right out of its head.

GRANDMA: Well, she did. That’s exactly what she did. But then, it kept its nose up in the air.…Well, for the last straw, it finally up and died; and you can imagine how that made them feel, having paid for it, and all.

To write about oneself with such detachment is to have very little sympathy for oneself—or to feel that sympathy is synonymous with self-pity, and should be avoided. Some of the sweet and mournful pathos that Albee wrests from these hard early works as their director may stem from his recognition of the difference between the artist he meant to be and the more forgiving man he has become. Although it was written first, “The Sandbox” closes the evening. And Albee is right to place it there, since the play now seems like a goodbye to his youthful asperity. In the twelve-minute work, a character called the Young Man (the funny and charming Jesse Williams) is also an angel of death; he stands in a bathing suit over a sandbox where Grandma sits, shovelling sand over herself while a cellist plays a beautiful adagio, and Mommy and Daddy act out their grief. (Believing that Grandma has died, Mommy says, “Well! Our long night is over. We must put away our tears, take off our mourning . . . and face the future. It’s our duty.”) Grandma’s death is just another convention of life, certainly when it comes to Mommy’s and Daddy’s lives. Watching this poem of a play, in which Albee incorporated many of the theatrical elements used by his contemporaries at the Judson Dance Theatre—movement, music, speech directed at the audience—I was reminded of a poem by James Merrill titled “The Broken Home.” Merrill wrote of himself, “A child, a red dog roam the corridors, / Still, of the broken home. No sound. The brilliant / Rag runners halt before wide-open doors. / My old room! Its wallpaper . . . brings back the first nightmares, / Long summer colds.…” It’s a world that Albee—who fled such a home—never got over.

The best reason to see “God’s Ear” (at the Vineyard) is that it gives you a chance to listen to the playwright Jenny Schwartz’s language. Rhythmic and dense, the script owes something to Albee’s love of wordplay and associations, but it would benefit from a dramaturge’s pruning and refining—and a stronger desire for clarity. The play turns on grief: a man and a woman have lost their son in a drowning accident. Now they’re drowning, too. While Schwartz is clearly a gifted writer, the first twenty minutes of the show would have worked better as a piece of fiction—the protagonists are simply too internal to affect us dramatically. I have every faith that Schwartz will eventually be able to create a credible dramatic world without losing her voice, but, in the meantime, she should be reminded that prose is not drama. ♦

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